The majority of the world's computing power is no longer concentrated
in supercomputer centers and machine rooms. Instead it is distributed
around the world in hundreds of millions of personal computers and
game consoles, many connected to the Internet. A new computing paradigm,
"public-resource computing", uses these PCs to do scientific
supercomputing. This paradigm enables new research in a number of areas
and has social implications as well: it catalyzes global communities
centered around common interests and goals, it encourages public
awareness of current scientific research, and it may give the public
a measure of control over the directions of science progress.

Biography:

Dr. David P. Anderson received graduate degrees in Mathematics and
Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin. From 1985 to 1992
he served on the faculty of the U.C. Berkeley Computer Science
Department. The topics of his published research include distributed
operating systems, realtime and multimedia systems, graphics,
computer music, and psychometrics applied to learning and aesthetic
preference. Since 1998 he has directed SETI@home, a pioneering
project in large-scale public distributed computing. He is currently
a Research Scientist at the U.C. Berkeley Space Sciences Laboratory.